Weekend's Best Live Music Bets: The Autumn Film, Wovenhand, the Hive Dwellers and more

The Autumn Film celebrates the release of its new record, 8-Track Tape, tonight at the Walnut Room.

Welcome to the weekend! Spring has officially sprung, and just as you can count on a another delightful couple of days weather wise, there's some great music awaiting you in the Mile High City. Locals rule this weekend. Tonight at the Walnut Room, the Autumn Film celebrates the release of its new album, 8-Track Tape, while Wovenhand pulls into the Oriental Theater tomorrow night for a show that many have been waiting for since it was announced with Swans frontman Michael Gira. Those are the biggest shows this weekend, but there's plenty of other options. Page down for your best bets.

Last August, the Autumn Film launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund their new album, 8-Track Tape. After successfully raising $8K, the outfit recorded the record and released it at the end of February. Tonight the group celebrates the release of its magnificent new recording. If you're a fan of the group's past releases, the Ship and the Sea and Safe and Sound, you're absolutely going to love this one. While Tifah Philips (formerly Al-Attas) and company are in dependably fine form, the latest batch of songs, which bare all the earnest heartrending hallmarks you've come to expect from the band, sound even bigger and more considered.

"Showing your work at a Santa Fe gallery is like having your mom and dad home at a party," says artist Vincent Fasano. That's why he and twin brother Charly (also known as "City Mouse") have been putting on art shows at the Phoenix Gallery in the basement of 3 Kings Tavern. This month, the brothers Fasano will present their own work alongside that of two other artists, Heretik Art and Faim Worldwide, during the March Art Show and Live Music Series, which features Booger Sugar tonight at 8 p.m. "It breaks the ice if there's a [rock] show going on," says Charly when explaining his preference for art shows at a music venue rather than a gallery. "I like my art to be surrounded by punk-rock music," agrees Vincent, whose vintage-themed Fast Geek Boutique is sponsoring the March series. "I'd take that over a gallery any day."

In his early bands, Bloodflower and The Denver Gentlemen, David Eugene Edwards was developing an aesthetic that some consider synonymous with all the significant music to have come out of Denver. But really, Edwards's ideas about music just gelled into a sound that embraced traditional American music while infusing it with an air of hazy mystery and raw emotional intensity when he formed 16 Horsepower in the early 1990s. Horsepower's immediacy and musical intimacy struck an immediate chord with audiences in Denver and further afield, to the point where the band enjoyed great popularity in parts of Europe. Equal parts folk and country but informed by the darkness of post-punk and the more haunting end of the blues, 16 Horsepower was an arresting live band. In the early part of the past decade, the band split, and Edwards formed Wovenhand, sometimes performing without accompaniment but often with side players to help flesh out the next phase of his songwriting.

If you haven't heard of K Records, you should seek it out immediately. The label's founder, Calvin Johnson, has embraced the idea of the eternal teenager in all of us as articulated by filmmaker John Cassavetes and run with it from the beginning. The history and catalogues of his bands, Beat Happening and Dub Narcotic Soundsystem, bear that out. So does his latest project, the Hive Dwellers. An unabashed celebration of minimalist rock and roll woven into bouncy electro pop, Johnson and his many collaborators have reinvented and kept relevant a spirit of artless creativity. The most recent Hive Dwellers release featured Karl Blau and LAKE's Andrew Dorsett, and it may turn out that both support Johnson on his ongoing song-and-dance-fueled revolt against the corporate ogre.

Colorado native Manuel Lopez discovered a fondness for Latin music after he stared playing congas in his early teens, and then found his way to the drum kit. Together with pianist Peter Ellingson and bassist Eduardo "Bijoux" Barbosa, Lopez's trio delves into a variety of repertoire from old Cuban standards to more modern arrangements. The trio plays at Dazzle every Sunday evening.

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